What Remains
My Family Memory and the Ethiopian Red Terror
What Remains: My Family Memory and the Ethiopian Red Terror explores how family memory survives when a person’s story is left largely untold
How do everyday objects preserve and transmit memories of political violence when those experiences are only partially told or recorded?
The story makes a difficult national history accessible through personal materials that survived outside official archives. By focusing on one individual’s experience, it offers younger generations a more personal and tangible way to engage with a history they did not experience themselves. Individual stories can make the human impact of political violence more immediate while showing how private histories contribute to collective memory. The story also highlights the gaps and uncertainties of intergenerational memory, inviting audiences to consider what is remembered, what is lost, and what is passed on.
An untold prison history
A DIGITAL STORY OF FAMILY MEMORY What Remains
My Family’s Memory and the Ethiopian Red Terror
The person behind the memory: my beloved father, Matiyas Mulugeta Demissie
He survived prison, but he never told me what happened.
The socks: an object that remembers
The socks
One surviving trace is a pair of socks my father made while imprisoned. Other prisoners were making socks, and he asked them to teach him, partly to occupy his mind. He asked my mother to bring him the thin metal ribs from inside an umbrella, which he filed and sharpened to make knitting needles. The socks are ordinary objects, but their creation records an extraordinary situation: imprisonment, scarcity, and the prisoners’ ability to create from limited materials.
My mother remembers that my father continued to wear them after he was released from prison. As an adult, I would sometimes massage my father’s feet. He would tell me to be gentle because his feet were sensitive, and he told me that this was as a result of the beatings he had received. Amnesty International’s 1978 report, Human Rights Violations in Ethiopia, documented the torture of political detainees under the Derg, including beatings of the soles of the feet.
The socks therefore became more than objects made during his imprisonment: they carried a memory of that experience into his life after release. For me, they now hold a trace of my father’s past, connecting an ordinary object to the violence his body remembered.
The poem: love in the archive
The poem
The next object is a poem my father gave my mother. They were not yet married. My mother had written him a birthday poem, and he wanted to return the gesture. As shown on the poem, Bashahe Teklemariam, a fellow prisoner, initially wrote it down for him, while later my father copied it in his own handwriting. My mother recalls that my father later took the poem back from her to refine it. Eventually, it remained in his wallet until his death.
Your face is the light that guides my path.
When my eye looks upon you, I have nothing but you.
Room No. 11
Room No. 11
Room No. 11: the number my father carried with him after his release
Another fragment is the memory of Room No. 11 at Kerchele Prison, also known as Alem Bekagn, meaning “Farewell to the World,” where my father was imprisoned. It was a major detention site in Addis Ababa during the Derg period and the Red Terror. When people came to visit him, my father was called from Room No. 11, and when he was released from prison, he brought the number “11” with him.
I did not know that this number existed, or the story behind it, until my mother sent me the photograph. For me, the photograph and the number became a newly recovered piece of family memory; a material trace connecting me to a place that had shaped my father’s experience but that I had never known about.
The missing embroidery
The missing embroidery
Another object has disappeared: an embroidery. During one of my mother’s Sunday prison visits, my father gave her an embroidered piece showing her carrying a pot on her head. She remembers its bright colours and the craftsmanship and how difficult it was to see a young man with such creativity confined as a political prisoner.
The embroidery remained in my parents’ bedroom for years before being lost. My mother still hopes it will be found. My sister and I also remember how beautiful it was. There is no photograph of it, making its absence part of our family archive, a reminder that archives are shaped not only by what survives, but also by what is lost.
In the absence of the embroidery: my mother who inspired it
The book: a question of remembrance
The book
Another object connects my father’s experience to my own intellectual journey: a book he brought specifically for me, Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide. The book concerns mass human rights violations in Rwanda, a history different from the violence my father experienced in Ethiopia, but one that speaks to the broader questions of violence, memory and accountability. Years later, I began researching transitional justice, Red Terror, memory and how societies deal with violent pasts. The book has become part of my family archive and a personal connection between my father’s experience of political imprisonment and the questions I would later come to investigate.
A book gifted by my father in 2015
My father is no longer here to tell his story, but his memory survives in objects, in my mother’s recollections, in my siblings’ memories, and in my own attempts to understand what I was never fully told. This raises the question at the heart of Who Owns Memory? when the person who lived through an experience is gone, who carries the responsibility for remembering it, and who has the right to tell it? I did not inherit my father’s complete story. I inherited its traces. Some remain, some are lost, and some perhaps will never be recovered. Yet through these fragments, his memory continues to move between people, objects and generations.
Sources & Credits
Original project references, visual sources and creator credits are collected here in one place.
- Creator & project
Eden Matiyas Mulugeta. Object story / object essay. Who Owns Memory? Digital Public Exhibition, First Cycle 2026.
1. Bridget Conley’s Memory from the Margins: The Red Terror Martyrs’ Memorial Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 2. Amnesty International Report on Human Rights Violations in Ethiopia. 3.Remember Alem Bekagn Alex de Waal in Addis Ababa.
- Visual and media material
Photographs, documents, illustrations, video and audio are attributed through the project text, captions and contributor documentation wherever that information was supplied. This exhibition page does not grant additional reuse permissions.
- Digital exhibition edition
Web presentation adapted for Who Owns Memory? (2026), with layout and language editing. The original contributors retain authorship of their research, interpretation and creative work.